“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross. I’m a … my son Ali goes to school at Latin with Gretchen.”
Eliza studied me a long moment before opening the door. The dog growled like a little demon.
“Hush, now,” Eliza said, and the dog stilled but kept a close eye on me.
The missing girl’s mother was in her mid-thirties but looked older in baggy sweatpants, Birkenstock sandals, and a George Mason University tee. Her hair was in disarray and graying at the roots. Her eyes were bloodshot, rheumy.
“Alex Cross,” she said. “You’re that cop on trial for murder.”
“Innocent as charged.”
“I read you’ve killed eleven people.”
“In the course of duty I have, that’s true.”
“I also read you’ve found kidnapped girls before.”
“That’s also true. Including my niece, who today is part of my defense team. Life can go on after an abduction, Mrs. Lindel.”
“That why you’re here?”
“In part. Can I come in?”
She hesitated, then stuck her face in her dog’s face. “You be good now, Tinker, hear?”
Tinker licked her cheek. Eliza set the dog down. The Jack Russell eyed me when Eliza stood aside and I entered. I smelled gin and cigarettes as I walked past her into a center hall lined with hooks where pictures had once hung.
“Is there somewhere we can sit and talk?” I asked.
“The kitchen. Straight ahead.”
She followed me down the hallway through an open doorway into a dingy white kitchen where dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, newspapers and unopened mail covered the table, and prescription bottles took up two entire shelves of a bookcase. I caught a whiff of something antiseptic and thought I heard muffled voices.
“How are you holding up?” I said.
Eliza pushed back a strand of hair. “How does it look like I’m holding up?”
“I can’t help asking—the pictures in the hall?”
She stared at me. Her lower lip quivered. “I couldn’t take looking at Gretchen anymore. She was ripping me up every time I walked through there.”
“The stress must feel unbearable.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Your husband?”
She stiffened. “Alden? Alden’s Alden. A trouper. Never gives up hope. Never says die.”
“I’m a clinical psychologist by training. I don’t know if he’s told you, but he’s been seeing me for therapy.”
She crossed her arms and studied me skeptically. “No, he didn’t say anything.”
“Two sessions.”
“Really? You’d think he would have told me. Why don’t we go ask him why he didn’t?”
My pulse quickened. “He’s here? I just saw him heading toward Capitol Hill. He looked like he was out for a night on the town. With another woman.”
“Another woman?” She laughed sarcastically. “I bet he smelled of cheap perfume, didn’t he?”
“I didn’t get close enough.”
“Well, you can now,” she said, gesturing at a door at the far end of the kitchen. “Alden’s right through there, watching Game of Thrones. Let’s go talk to him. Get things out in the open.”
“Let’s do that,” I said. I crossed the kitchen and went through the door.
CHAPTER
71
A WAVE OF antiseptic smells hit me as I stepped down into a space set up as a hospital room.
To my right, shelves bulged with medical equipment, supplies, and clean linens. To my immediate left there was a tall green oxygen tank with a hose that ran over to a hospital bed with its back raised.
Beyond the tank, an array of electronic monitors cheeped and beeped over the sounds coming from a speaker system linked to the big screen mounted on the opposite wall. According to a tag in the lower right corner of the screen, season 3, episode 4, of Game of Thrones was showing.
I took a few more steps into the room and saw a man in the bed. He reminded me of the physicist Stephen Hawking, gaunt, bent, and curled up by disease. Breathing oxygen through a nasal cannula, he lay on his right side, wore glasses, and watched the screen intently, seeming to have no idea we were there.
“That’s not the Alden Lindel who came to see me,” I said.
“I didn’t think so,” Eliza said.
“I don’t know why I didn’t check.”
“Why would you? We’re private about Al’s challenges because that’s the way he wants it. How could you have known he has end-stage ALS?”
“I suppose,” I said, and I felt baffled until I realized that the man who’d posed as Alden Lindel brought me the flash drives that showed the mock executions of Gretchen Lindel.
No one had sent those drives to him. He was part of Killingblondechicks4fun. And so was the love junkie.
Tinker darted by us and jumped up on the bed, wagging her tail.
“E-liza,” an electronic voice said.
She smiled at me before going to his side. “Right here, Al.”
“N-ext?”
“You’re not even through that one yet, and the next is in the queue,” she said with a glance at me. “He loves this show.”
“S-mart dwarf,” he said. “B-oobs.”
“Yes, Tyrion and lots of boobs,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’d like you to meet someone, Al. He’s trying to find Gretchen for us.”
I came over to her husband’s bedside. Laboring for breath, the real father of the missing blond girl rolled his eyes up to me.
“I’m Alex Cross, sir,” I said.
He had a digital tablet next to him on the mattress. He rolled his eyes down and blinked eleven or twelve times, maybe more.
“I know you,” the tablet said a few seconds later.
“Wow,” I said. “How does that work?”
Eliza said, “The tablet’s built with three camera lenses that triangulate to pick up where he’s looking on the screen, which shows a keyboard layout. He looks at a letter on the keyboard and blinks. When he blinks twice, he’s done with the word. Blinks three times and the voice comes on.”
“That’s amazing.”
“I think so.”
The tablet voice said, “B-lows, you ask me.”
Lindel was peering at me again, and I nodded in sympathy.
He looked at the tablet. A few seconds later, the voice said, “Where’s my Gretch?”
Thinking about the fake Alden Lindel and Annie Cassidy coming to my office, I said, “She could be closer than we think. Within driving distance.”
The missing girl’s father looked down at the tablet. His synthesized voice said, “Can’t even cry for her.”
Eliza’s hand shot to her lips. “It’s true. His tear ducts are shutting down. We have to put drops in every two hours.”
Her husband rolled his attention to the tablet for the longest time yet before the voice said, “My time is near, Cross. My last wish is to see my Gretch again. One last time.”
He peered up at me. Even though his body and face were virtually frozen, I could see the desperate hope in his eyes.
“I’ll do my best, Al,” I said. “Just hang on.”
I gave Eliza Lindel my cell phone number, said good-bye to her and her husband, and left the house feeling humbled.
The day before, with the weight of the evidence in my murder trial so stacked against me, I’d been thinking that life was treating me pretty damn unfairly. But here the real Alden Lindel’s life was being squeezed from him by a disease that was killing him one paralyzed muscle at a time. And there was his courageous wife, caring for him and worried sick about their missing daughter.
All in all, I had nothing to bitch about.
I got in the car thanking God and the universe for the blessings in my life: my wife, my family, my home, my health, my friends, my—
My cell phone rang. It was Anita Marley.
“Judge Larch had a transient ischemic attack,” she said. ?
??No stroke.”
“Hey, that’s good news.”
“It is,” she said. “I like Judge Larch. A lot. Her clerk’s saying we’re back in session the day after tomorrow.”
“Even better.”
“You still sticking with your story about the guns?”
“Yes. I’m telling you I saw them.”
“My analysts agree with the FBI. There’s no evidence of doctoring. But we’ll try to raise some reasonable doubt based on the fact that the phones were supposedly in the factory for months.”
I wasn’t convinced it would do any good. Later, as I was turning onto Fifth, my phone rang again.
Sampson said, “Are you busy tomorrow?”
“No trial until Wednesday.”
“Tell Bree I’m taking you fishing in Pennsylvania to get your mind off things. I’ll pick you up at five.”
CHAPTER
72
IN THE CHILL gray light of an autumn dawn, I watched fog swirling around the trunks and through the branches of leafless oak trees. Clusters of acorns still clung to some, but many more littered the forest floor. It was quiet but for the distant sound of a creek and the irregular patter of oak mast falling.
“Alex?” Sampson said behind me. “I got it to work finally.”
I turned to find him looking at an iPad on the hood of his Grand Cherokee. Still clutching my second big cup of fast-food coffee, I walked over and looked at the iPad, which had a satellite connection.
Sampson had the Google Earth app launched. It gave us a bird’s-eye view of a rural area forty miles northwest of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where several creeks met and formed a trout stream roughly three miles from where we were standing. The stream ran by a fifty-acre property adjoining an un-paved country road. A long two-track driveway wound from the road past meadows to a line of mature pines that shielded a large hollow between two ridges.
A modest ranch house sat in a clearing in the bottom of the hollow. There was a barn larger than the house and five other sheds and smaller structures. A substantial garden flanked the back of the barn. Beside the garden stood a big satellite dish.
I tapped on the dish. “That what they’re keying on?”
Sampson nodded. “Big bandwidth coming and going. Lots of electricity being used on the property. And many of the recent uploads to Killingblondechicks have evidently come through that satellite dish. We’ve got the IP address.”
“Seems strange,” I said. “When Krazy Kat Rawlins looked at that website, he couldn’t tell where most of the videos of blondes were coming from because they used onion routers. And our guys were able to track them?”
“Maybe the guys making them got lazy,” Sampson said. “It happens.”
“The woods around here do look like the woods in the videos of Gretchen Lindel and Delilah Franks,” I said. “The blondes running in the trees?”
“I remember,” Sampson said. “And the lesbian girls disappeared less than sixty miles east of here. They could all be in that house or in any of those outbuildings.”
“Wish you’d gotten the search warrant.”
“Not enough evidence yet, the judge said. Which is why you’re here and Fox isn’t. Like I said, we’re going fishing.”
We got back in the car. It felt good to be riding shotgun with Sampson again. My world seemed even better than it had leaving the Lindels the evening before.
I switched the iPad app to Google Maps and used it to navigate the labyrinth of dirt roads around the property. Somewhere on it, there was a computer belonging to a twenty-seven-year-old named Carter Flint. In the satellite image, there were six or seven vehicles in Flint’s yard.
But driving past that line of pines into the hollow, we spotted only two: a faded red Ford Ranger pickup and an old Toyota Corolla that looked in need of springs, both with their noses toward an embankment below the ranch house.
Sampson parked sideways behind them, blocking anyone trying for a quick exit. We got out. The fog was lifting from the ridges above the hollow. A dog barked in the distance beyond the pole barn. Closer, I heard the blatting of a sheep and the squeal of a pig or two.
We went up a crumbling brick walkway and knocked on the front door. No answer. No sounds inside. Sampson knocked again, and I thought I caught a flutter of movement in a window to my right. But again there was no answer.
“Let’s take a look around,” I said. “Maybe he’s in the barn.”
As we crossed the yard and got closer to the barn, the animal sounds got louder, more frantic, the dog barking, the sheep blatting, and the pig squealing. I knocked at a side door, then tried the knob. It turned. I pushed the door open. Bells hanging on the inner knob jangled.
The pig started squealing in an even higher pitch. The sheep blatted in terror. So did the dog; it sounded desperate, crying and yelping.
We stepped inside and took in the cavernous space in one long, sweeping, and horrified glance.
“Jesus Christ,” Sampson said. “This isn’t right.”
CHAPTER
73
THE PIG WAS forty pounds or so. It was in a low wire pen and was missing a two-inch-wide strip of skin along the length of its spine; it was clearly in terrible pain.
A lamb was in a pen beside the pig. Three of its legs were broken and it was struggling piteously.
The dog, a beagle, had been beaten with a blunt object. It tried over and over to get to its feet, but it kept falling and yelping for help.
Three GoPro cameras on tripods were aimed at the cages. Beyond the pens, a long workbench stretched the length of the side wall. On it were dozens of pieces of grotesque taxidermy, animals stuffed in their tortured state.
Behind the bench, the rear sliding door of the pole barn was open to the big garden. Thirty, maybe forty more creatures—small dogs and cats, wild things like skunks and opossums, even an owl—were stuffed in positions that preserved their agony and set in the garden in neat little rows. A few were dressed in doll clothes, which only made the situation more disturbing.
“We need to call in the locals,” Sampson said.
Before I could reply, a man wearing headphones appeared in the open doorway to the garden. Bone thin and dressed in painter’s pants and a green wife-beater, he had skin as pale as a fish belly, pinkish eyes, and wispy hair the color of snow.
Two steps into the barn, as he was smiling at the wounded animals in their pens, he spotted us over by the door. He ripped off his headphones.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“Police,” Sampson said, holding up his badge. “You Carter Flint?”
Shock locked Flint in his tracks for a second as he looked from John’s badge to the suffering animals. Then he whirled and flew out the barn door.
I tore after him. I had no jurisdiction. I wasn’t even a cop, technically, but after what I’d seen, I wasn’t letting the sadist who’d done it get away.
Neither was Sampson; he was off my left shoulder, exiting the barn into the garden. Flint was surprisingly fast and nimble. He was already beyond the garden’s borders and racing behind two other outbuildings toward the north tree line at the base of a ridge a hundred and fifty yards away.
“If he makes those woods, we’ll lose him,” Sampson growled.
I gritted my teeth and danced through the stuffed animals until I hit the grass, then I told myself to be like Jannie—relax and run. For thirty yards I was convinced I’d catch him, but Flint was younger and, judging from the way he was gaining ground, much fitter than me.
But not fitter than Sampson, who blew by me.
When Flint was forty yards from the woods, he hit tall, tangled grass. It slowed him. But it didn’t slow John, whose long legs had him leaping after the sadist. Flint looked back in desperation and then lunged for the woods.
Sampson ran up a hummock in the weeds and dived after him.
CHAPTER
74
SAMPSON’S SHOULDER AND his two hundred and twenty pounds drove into the back of Fl
int’s legs, flattening him in the deep wet grass. I ran up, gasping, as John straddled the sadist and kept his shoulders pinned.
“My knee.” Flint moaned. “Something snapped. And I got broken ribs.”
Sampson dug out zip cuffs and wrenched Flint’s arms up behind him, which provoked another round of howling.
“My ribs!”
“Screw your ribs,” Sampson said. “And screw your knee. You’re lucky I don’t kick out your front teeth.”
I helped Sampson up and then pulled Flint to his feet. His left leg buckled, and he began to whimper.
“I can’t help it, man. I got a mental sickness. I tried to stop. I did, but—”
“Save it for a judge,” Sampson said.
“Where are the blond women?” I said. “Which building?”
He didn’t react at first. Then he looked confused. “What blond women?”
“The ones you made those movies of,” Sampson said. “Fake executions. Uploaded them to the Killingblondechicks site.”
“No,” he said. “I watched some free videos on that site, but that’s not me.”
“All the recent uploads have been coming from your IP,” Sampson said.
Flint shook his head. “I’ve never submitted to that site. Never. I do animals for animal sites. Not humans. I’d never do humans.”
“Try telling that to a jury after they’ve seen your barn,” I said.
“I’m telling the truth,” he said. “Maybe I deserve punishment for what I’ve done, who I am. But if those blonde videos came through my IP, man, someone frickin’ hacked and hijacked my computer! I’m being framed!”
Part Four
IN DEFENSE OF ALEX CROSS
CHAPTER
75
SHORTLY BEFORE DARK, Sampson dropped me off at the entrance to the alley that runs behind my house. With my trial starting up again in the morning, there were bound to be more journalists in front of my house.
There’d been other journalists gathered at the bottom of Carter Flint’s road when we left. After Sampson called the local sheriff to tell them we’d made a citizen’s arrest, we’d waited until Flint was in custody and the three animals mercifully euthanized before we helped in the search for the girls. We’d found enough disturbing evidence to put Flint behind bars or in a psychiatric institution for years but no trace of Gretchen Lindel or Delilah Franks or the four other missing women.